Tag Archives: Emily Dickinson: A Medicine Woman for Our Times

In his brilliant and urgently prophetic new book, Emily Dickinson: A Medicine Woman for Our Times, Steven Herrmann, using extraordinarily acute literary critical techniques along with powerfully insightful depth psychological tools, plumbs the depths and scales the heights of yet another great 19th Century American author. Herrmann’s deep dive into what can be recovered as well as surmised about the inner life of Emily Dickinson reveals a complex “volcanic” and at the same time perhaps painfully introverted “medicine woman,” or shaman, on a mission to reveal not only to her fellow-Americans but also to the entire world her vision of what authentic human wholeness entails. In Herrmann’s interpretation, that includes what he terms a “bi-erotic” and “spiritually democratic” embracing of one’s own post-religious, post-gender conflicted “cosmic” core, which ultimately and immediately both resonates with and finally is identical not only to the totality of humankind in its fullness, but also the entirely of what is. Herrmann’s optimism that a new era of bi-erotic spiritual democracy is on the verge of becoming abundantly manifest within all human societies throughout the world is contagious!